Bagged Hay Storage System Utilizes Air

When silage bags are used to store dry hay rather than corn silage or haylage, air becomes a friend, says Owen Brown.

In his new Air-Barn dry hay storage system, bales are placed in 12’-diameter silage bags. Then air is blown over and around them to remove heat and moisture as the hay cures. The result is greener, higher-quality hay than is possible with conventional barn storage, he claims.

Brown, a Pittsfield, IL, hay grower, also owns GFC, a company he formed to manufacture and market his first invention, the Bale Band-It small-bale packaging machine.

The Air-Barn is intended to be used with 21-bale bundles made by the Bale Band-It, but works with big square and round bales, too. Brown says 3 x 3’ and 3 x 4’ square bales can be loaded into bags three high. He’s working on an attachment for loading pairs of round bales side by side.

The system consists of a square-framed bagger, a 12” or 18” fan, fan stand and bag. Bales are loaded into the bagger with a front-end loader, utilizing a pair of hinged side panels on the bagger to help guide them in. The first bales are placed at the end of the bag, then the bagger is pulled ahead to unfold the bag and make room for more bales.

When the bag is full, it’s closed and secured tightly around the fan. The needed fan size depends on the hay’s moisture content, says Brown. Air is changed every 7½ minutes with a 12” fan; every four minutes with an 18” fan.

“So the ventilation is far superior than in a building,” he says.

Bags can be up to 250’ long. He recommends that the fan be run continuously for about 60 days; then it can be moved to another bag. A fan is needed even when the hay is very dry going in.

“All hay goes through a cure,” says Brown. “You’re going to have to run the fan, because you can’t put hay in a bag without producing moisture.”

Currently, he’s not calling the Air-Barn a dryer. He tells owners to bale at their usual moisture levels, using a preservative if that’s what they normally do.

The bagger has two wheels for pulling it to a new location, or it can be lifted and hauled with a loader. Bags can be filled anywhere electricity is available.

He says he built it because many potential Bale Band-It customers want to switch from round bales to small squares but don’t have enough storage. Some clients rent hay ground and don’t want to put a permanent structure on that land.

“We wanted something that would not be a capital investment like a building, plus be more flexible.”

In a 2012 test, Agri-King compared Bale Band-It bundles of preservative-treated and untreated hay stored in an Air-Barn and a building. The hay went into storage at 20.5% moisture. Air-Barn hay stayed cooler and tested 13 relative feed value points higher than the other hay at the end of the trial, Brown reports.

Discuss this Article 4

What a great invention! I especially like it as I don’t have a sufficiently-sized storage shed for the amount of bales I am producing at the moment. I have been renting space from the farm next door, and putting off building a structure due to the expense involved. This could be the answer I’ve been looking for and save me the time and money of investing in a new barn.

This is something new that I rarely read about in farming articles. I guess this dry hay storage system could be a breakthrough technology that is environmentally-friendly while achieving great results and that is to remove heat and moisture from the hay. I like reading about such successful innovations because sometimes farming could sound dull and boring to some of us, but it is new technologies like this that fascinate us.

This new technology of bagged hay storage system that utilizes air is interesting. I have heard of this from another mate who owns a huge piece of land and is into processing and storage of hay for sale. He said that the new technology saves him a lot of money but making the process faster, more convenient and easier to use and taught to his workers. With a shorter period of time, he is able to process more hay and can dispose these faster, too.